The following video is from 2005, when the Senate majority Republicans were contemplating the use of the "nuclear option" to stop the minority Democrats from blocking Bush's judicial nominees. The Republicans wanted the judicial nominees to be allowed an up or down vote. Adoption of the nuclear option would have changed longstanding Senate rules requiring a 60-vote supermajority to overcome a filibuster and invoke cloture (ending debate and allowing a vote). With the nuclear option, only a simple majority of votes (51) would have been required for cloture. In 2005, the Republicans wanted the nuclear option to apply only to judicial nominees. The nuclear option was never implemented. Instead, a deal was struck between the Democrats and Republicans regarding Bush's judicial nominees.

Here is how Democrats reacted to the spectre of the nuclear option back in 2005.

I suppose I should write about yesterday's bipartisan health care summit, although I'm not sure exactly why. Nothing was accomplished. Nothing changed. Republicans believe the existing comprehensive health care reform bills should be scrapped and a more incremental approach should be taken. Democrats believe the whole health care shebang should be changed with one 2,400-2.700 page bill. We already knew these things going into the historic health care summit, and that's where things stand today. What both sides do agree upon is that we need health insurance reform of some kind.

Btw, the only reason I'm calling the health care summit 'historic' is because CNN referred to it that way about 5,000 times yesterday. I'm not sure what was so historic about it, except for the fact that it occurred. By that definition, everything that happens is historic. By that definition, I'm writing a historic blog entry right now. However, I don't think I'll be notifying the Smithsonian of my efforts. I'm not that impressed with myself, and I wasn't that impressed with the health care summit. It wasn't exactly the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the Emancipation Proclamation. Those are things I consider historic. I suppose if one hadn't paid any attention to the nearly year-long health care debate, and then watched yesterday's summit, it would have been illuminating. For anyone who has been paying attention, it was just more of the same. I'm trying to think of anything I learned that I didn't know before, and I can only think of one thing. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said if we took away all the profits of all the insurance companies, it would pay for 2 days of health care, leaving the other 363 days of the year still to be paid. I didn't know that before.

For most of the last year, I thought the Republican party should have been the party of 'no.' Resisting Obama's health care takeover, the stimulus boondoggle, and cap-and-trade....those were definitely times for the GOP to say 'NO'.

But lately, the GOP has been saying 'NO' to things they should be saying 'YES' to, such as the jobs bill and the Congressional deficit reduction committee.

A couple incidents from the recent C-PAC Conservative conference led me to believe Conservatives are moving toward Libertarianism, a move I mostly welcome.

The first was Ron Paul winning the C-PAC straw poll vote for the 2012 GOP presidential nominee. Paul captured a surprising 31% of the vote, with Mitt Romney in second place at 22%. No other Republican tallied higher than single digits. Sarah Palin took third place with 7%. Paul's victory is probably due to the fact that over half the C-PAC attendees were under the age of 25. It's the younger conservatives who I feel are more Libertarian-leaning, which is borne out by the second incident I'm mentioning.

If you listen to the liberal media or the mainstream media (pardon my redundancy), you probably know that the Tea Party movement consists of the six 'R's - Racist Radical Retarded Redneck Revolutionary Rubes. You know the Tea Party movement hates Obama because he is black, and that the Tea Partiers sit around all day cleaning their guns in anticipation of the violent overthrow of the government. You know those crazed Tea Party nuts are hate-filled, foaming-at-the-mouth, illiterate morons who can barely speak in full sentences. You are probably surprised they don't walk on all fours...if you listen to our esteemed media.

Now I'd like to show you a list of twenty policy proposals that the Tea Party people have chosen to vote upon among themselves, to either approve or disapprove. Wait until you get a load of the far-out, loony, and subversive ideas these extremists have cooked up out of their fevered minds. Here they are:

Six days ago, President Obama signed Pay-Go legislation into law. Pay-Go required that federal spending be paid for, in order to stop the spiraling federal budget deficits and debt. A worthy notion, but we should have suspected something was amiss when the Pay-Go legislation also included a provision to raise the debt ceiling to $14.2 trillion. Why would we need to raise the debt ceiling if we were going to pay for federal spending going forward ? It's a non-sequitur. If we truly were going to pay for federal spending going forward, the Pay-Go legislation would have frozen the debt ceiling where it is.

Of course, Obama and company never had any intention of paying for the government's spending. Pay-Go was just for show, like the previous Pay-go legislation(s) that were passed. The Democrats are already trying to get around the Pay-Go legislation to pass their jobs bill. After all, six days ago was so...last week. The Hill reports, in a piece titled Pay-Go Gets Passed, Then Bypassed:

Back in October, the CBO estimated that enacting medical tort reform legislation with a $250,000 cap on damages for pain and suffering, along with a $500,000 cap on punitive damages, would save $54 billion over ten years. That's $54 billion in savings on Medicare/Medicaid alone, because the CBO estimates only government costs. If you add up the savings to the entire health care system, which the CBO estimates as 0.5% of health care costs, that comes to a savings of $11 billion per year, or $110 billion over a decade. The savings figures could be higher or lower depending on the damages caps. Other studies have shown the costs of defensive medicine associated with fears of malpractice lawsuits to be responsible for 18-28% of medical tests and 13% of hospitalizations. The actual cost savings with legitimate tort reform could be much, much greater than the CBO estimates.

Because the high cost of medical care is the core problem with the American health care system, and because those high costs are part of the reason our government is on an unsustainable path to bankruptcy, why would we NOT enact tort reform when it can save us so much money ? This shouldn't be a partisan issue. It's a common sense issue. It seems insane not to incorporate tort reform into ObamaCare, yet it is not there. The President has given lip service to the idea a few times, but he has never once vocalized a preference for caps for medical damages awards, never once said what those caps should be. If Obama truly wants to "bend down the cost curve," as he says repeatedly, tort reform is one sure way to do it.

Most people have accepted as fact the notion that the earth has warmed over the last century, even if they debate the reasons behind it. The last IPCC assessment deemed global warming to be "unequivocal." When I have discussed global warming previously on this blog, I always accepted as fact the underlying idea that the earth has warmed slightly, though I was skeptical of all the doomsday rhetoric being spewed by the global warming alarmists.

But British scientists and others are now saying the earth may not be warming at all.

I keep thinking I should write a post about my differences with the Republican party, but Democrats keep talking, thereby constantly reminding me why I detest Democrats, so I never quite get around to the Republicans. Here are a few of the latest examples of Demo-speak.

"I am very optimistic about, about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration." --Vice President Joe Biden, Febrary 2010.

I'm not sure whether to be happy that Obama has mastered the obvious by realizing that businesses produce jobs, or to be appalled that he has to remind Democrats that we need a healthy financial system whether the Dems LIKE IT OR NOT. What is the alternative to a healthy private financial system of banks ? The alternative is the government nationalizing the banking industry, aka, socialism. It therefore comes as no surprise to find that a majority of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism, according to a Gallup poll. Perhaps Obama is saying we must deal with these nasty private business entities until the Great Socialist Revolution sweeps all those evil businesses away. Which leads me directly to the next quote....

Here's the video of Sarah Palin's keynote speech at the Tea Party Convention. The mainstream media usually covers Palin by saying things like, "she throws red meat to the conservative base." Then they find the most controversial quote they can dig up, report that, and call Palin "polarizing" and/or "divisive." That's about the extent of how they cover Palin, except for the disparaging comments about her intellect and other various personal attacks. (question - why doesn't the MSM ever call Obama polarizing and divisive ? To me, he's the most divisive President in memory). The Associated Press actually called the following speech "short on ideas, but long on enthusiasm." That was their "objective" conclusion. I disrespectfully disagree - a lot. The AP was trying to minimize Palin, as the media generally attempts to do with her. That game is getting very tired, and very transparent.

Without further ado, here is the Palin speech in it's entirety. The video is just over 59 minutes long. Judge for yourself:

When President Clinton declared 'the era of big government is over" in 1996, the federal budget of the United States Of America was $1.56 trillion. A mere fifteen years later, President Obama has announced a $3.83 trillion budget for 2011. I don't think I'm alone in saying the rumors of the death of big government were greatly exaggerated. The increase in spending alone since 1996 ($2.3 trillion) is substantially more than the entire federal budget was in 1996. It's no surprise that federal revenue has not been able to keep up with this spending explosion, and even if it had, imagine the effect that would have had on our economy. Imagine the economy as it is now, but with the federal tax burden DOUBLE what it is currently. Nightmarish.

It's not like GDP increases justify this spending boom either. In 1996, the GDP was $7.762 trillion. Now, it's $14.4 trillion. Our GDP has increased by 85% while our federal spending has increased by 145% over the same period. If our federal spending was in line with GDP, the federal budget should be around $2.88 trillion now, but it's a trillion dollars higher. We've managed to increase spending by a trillion dollars per year above GDP. That's a trillion per year that comes out of the private sector, a trillion per year more that comes out of the taxpayers pockets.